For the longest time, the FHS was cared for by its original editors: Dan Quinlan, Rusty Russell, and Chris Yeoh. We should all be grateful that they created a useful and well-written standard–one that has been resilient enough to remain useful for six years without changes. Even though it’s time to move on, we should not forget that we are building on a strong foundation they laid for us.

So, you may be asking: how can I help? Glad you asked!

First of all, get the word out! If you know people who might be interested (developers for Linux distributions, standards people, etc.), point them to this post or to the LSB announcement linked earlier.

We have set up the usual open-source project infrastructure: a bug tracker, version control (using Bazaar), a mailing list, and a wiki (of sorts; it’s actually a page on the LSB wiki). Come and join in! Subscribe to the mailing list, post comments on the wiki, check out the source and submit patches.

The bug tracker deserves special mention. We hosted it for the old FHS project, and so we’re continuing to use it. In particular, we’ll be doing triage on the old bugs there, as well as any new bugs filed. So go ahead and file bugs, or add comments to old bugs; we’ll be taking those into account for the new update. If you file new bugs, please file them against the “FHS” product.

We’re tentatively shooting for a goal of releasing FHS 3.0 before July, though that’s not written in stone. But we don’t want to wait much longer than we’ve already had to.